Product owner vs business analyst

From your reading of the Scrum Guide, is there a business analyst role at all?

What does the Guide say about a Product Owner's work, and who might do it? Could there still be a use for someone with business analysis skills?

Hi Ian,

From my understanding and reading of the guide there is no business analyst role.

 

I just reread the product owner section and it certainly sounds like the sort of thing that a business analyst 'might' do (amongst other things).

Personally I do think there is still a use for people with business analysis skills, although they might also be the product owner?

In your experience are there people with business analysis skills (aka business analysts by job title) and a product owner embedded within a team or generally just a product owner?

Remember that the Scrum Guide defines ROLES not job descriptions. And it is very possible for many people to do functions of a role.  So having someone with a title of Business Analyst and someone with a title of Product Owner work together on a team is not unusual.  However you do need one individual that is ultimately responsible for the decisions for that role. 

My current company has Product Managers that work together with Business Analysts and User Experience Engineers to fulfill the Product Owner role.  The Product Manager is ultimately responsible for the product direction and decisions of that matter. 

Every company adopts Scrum, or Agile, differently. I have not seen it done one way. In some organizations, the Product Owner is no more than a Lead Business Analyst, and the Product Manager owns the Product. In other organizations, several Business Analysts act as Product Owner proxies and assist the Product Owner on a large and complex product.

Daniel thanks for sharing your experience, when you say Scrum defines a role of product owner I completely understand this, but the Scrum guide does say "The Product Owner is one person, not a committee."

If there are multiple people fulfilling this role, although one person is still ultimately responsible that doesn't sound like it is in accordance with the Scrum guide?

I get it is different at different organisations and I did previously work on a large system for NHS bookings which had multiple product owners for discrete parts of the system but all of the user stories were written by business analysts.

There's nothing to stop a Development Team from having business analysis skills.

The Scrum Guide says:

The Product Owner may do the above work, or have the Development Team do it. However, the Product Owner remains accountable.

In your experience at the NHS, how clear was this accountability for each product?

If you insist on figuring out which roles in a traditional development team are equivalent to Scrum roles, you may be disappointed. 

For the new Scrum team, I will tell them that the product owner is like an entrepreneur. S/he is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team. 

What s/he cares about is the rate of return on investment.

As for what expertise s/he must have, or what role s/he has played, this is not the point. As long as s/he can find someone to help her/his accomplish her/his goal.

In your experience at the NHS, how clear was this accountability for each product?

It was not overly clear who was actually accountable, it felt like as developers we were ultimately accountable and the product owners were healthcare professionals, from what I know the business analysts wrote the user stories and performed the analysis but worked in some way with these product owners.

If you insist on figuring out which roles in a traditional development team are equivalent to Scrum roles, you may be disappointed. 

That is not what I am trying to do really, what I wanted to understand is whether someone who fills the 'role' of product owner should also have business analysis skills and be performing the 'job' of a business analyst.

By this I mean someone has ultimate responsibility for the product and ensures value is added but is that person necessarily going to be going out and working with users, gathering requirements and drawing up diagrams. This is the impression that I was given after attending the workshop.

I think the answer is they could, but they might not and its completely dependent on the project/organisation, so being told that this is the case is not necessarily true.

it felt like as developers we were ultimately accountable and the product owners were healthcare professionals

I thought I should expand on why I said this... it felt like this because the product owners were not involved in our day to day activities although they were at the show and tells.

And it felt more like the responsibility fell on the development teams because there were road maps of the work which needed to be completed by certain dates and which felt more like the indicator of success.

The part where product owners talked about what work would add value happened somewhere else and we were not aware of it and to me it was not clear who was accountable for anything.

What we were doing was a form of Scrum (I think) but was called "Enterprise Agile", it looks in hindsight like a version of SAFe and there were lots of layers of project managers, delivery managers and programme managers, as well as technical leads and delivery managers from the private consultancy who had the lions share of the work.

ts first to comprehend the key change between waterfall and agile model. Agile has acquired the influence, strength and responsibility of the project manager, the developers and the company stakes (product owner and development team).. This helps the project manager/master and the company owners to concentrate on more critical work.

Let's begin with what is between BA and PO the same thing. Speak to the business parties involved, understand how the procedure should be handled, understand what needs to be done and modified. 

This is not what BA has to do. Write the Federal Republic of Germany's lenthy. Have a target, make 40 separate document updates for the business team. You compose only one or two stories now and clarify them. By requisition you are no longer a bottleneck.

What does BA have to do with this PO? Be face to face with all business needs. The project manager or scrum master no longer needs to discuss priority and 50 stakeholders. You are still in charge of priority. All would blame you if you get the priority wrong. Fortunately, as a PO, priority becomes very basic and second nature. You must present and cannot vanish by creation every day. The bigger story has to be slid and reduced, and the scope has to be cut. You have no luxury in calling a meeting to identify the scope next week with all the stakeholders. In hours, you have to decide.

As far as the IIBA is concerned, every member of a product team fits their definition of a Business Analyst.

Business Analysis is the practice of enabling change in an organizational context, by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.

If there are members in your product team who are not doing that, "why"? My experience is every person in a multi-functional team to do that, "and..."

As with a Scrum Master, every person in the Scrum Team wears many personas at different moments during a sprint.

Particularly during backlog refinement, everybody present is undertaking business analysis - but also during PBI elicitation in whatever form that takes.

Having said all of that. There probably isn't room in a team of <10 for a person who does nothing other than business analysis: "there are no full time business analysts in a scrum team."

If you want to know what a business analysis practitioner (a person who does business analysis activity...note they doing call that person a "business analyst"!)  does in an agile organisation, go read the BABOK Agile Extension. I don't know if the Agile Alliance was really supposed to make it publically available, or not - but typically work in a Scrum team is focussed on the Delivery horizon.

There are good instights there for any member of a Scrum team who finds they are all of a sudden expected to take on "BA work" because "we're agile now."

https://www.agilealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/AgileExtension…

@Garrie, I have seen and been on teams where there is someone who does a lot of the BA type activities working closely with the PO on the Scrum Team. I have also seen where there is a "BA Service" if you will that works with the PO to help because full-time is not required.  

That said, yes, everyone is doing some sort of BA work throughout too like refinement...

A PO is also a Business Analyst. A BA is essentially a bridge between IT and business which is what scrum.org says for those who aim to be PSPO trainers. Nothing much to debate on it.

https://www.scrum.org/become-professional-scrum-trainer/pspo

"

Scrum.org is looking for people with deep experience as Scrum Product Owners.  To apply as a PST candidate for the PSPO program, you must first:

• Have 4+ years of experience as a Product Owner where you have:

  • Maximized the value of software products and the work of the Development Teams

  • Effectively managed a Product Backlog

  • Worked extensively with business stakeholders

  • Been held accountable for the success of your product

  • Been empowered to make key business decisions

  • Helped organizations bridge the traditional gap between business and IT  "